Well, [Jonas] Aistis, by the way, held [Boris] Pasternak in great esteem and he even has poems with epigraphs, with mottos from Pasternak. Well, and… then after graduating from university I made a living working as a translator, that is to say, I signed a contract with a publisher to translate books, a novel or something similar. I would spend half a year or a year translating something, then I would hand it in and get a fee and on those it was possible to live... it was possible for about a year... it was possible to live on that for a year. Not in luxury, not lavishly, but then almost nobody lived in luxury and lavishly in Lithuania. And I could live like everyone else, and so I lived like that, I had no job. But then I thought up a strange thing and very risky one – to set up a self-education groupto which young people would come and… the group was not a public one – in fact it was clandestine – and to share information on contemporary world culture. That culture was hardly accessible in Lithuania. And we wanted to give talks about the best known of our contemporaries, world writers – contemporaries or somewhat earlier ones – about [Ernest] Hemingway, about [James] Joyce, [Franz] Kafka, about [Eugène] Ionesco. I remember giving a talk and we even tried to put on his play La Leçon [The Lesson] which is on in Paris now, as far as I know, in a theatre, a 20th century classic. Also, about musicians of that period, about architects, about people in the theatre. And there might have been 10 of us young people – a group who would get together in a private flat and give talks to one another. In this way we also learned. It was a self-education group. Of course, those things were prohibited, all the more so since we were studying authors, artists who... about whom people avoided talking. Not always because of politics but they were modernists, they were, so to speak... they had nothing to do with the understandingof the arts in the Soviet Union which prevailed at the time. And it was wiser not to talk about them, whereas we talked about them and tried to understand what they were writing and what they wanted... what they wanted to say.

Born in 1937, Tomas Venclova is a Lithuanian scholar, poet, author and translator of literature. He was educated at Vilnius University and later at Tartu University. As an active participant in the dissident movement he was deprived of Soviet citizenship in 1977 and had to emigrate. Between 1977 and 1980 he lectured at University of California, Berkeley, where he became friends with the Polish poet Czesław Miłosz, who was a professor of Slavic Languages and Literature at the school, as well as the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky. He is currently a full professor at Yale University.

Film director and documentary maker, Andrzej Wolski has made around 40 films since 1982 for French television, the BBC, TVP and other TV networks. He specializes in portraits and in historical films. Films that he has directed or written the screenplay for include Kultura, which he co-directed with Agnieszka Holland, and KOR which presents the history of the Worker’s Defence Committee as told by its members. Andrzej Wolski has received many awards for his work, including the UNESCO Grand Prix at the Festival du Film d’Art.